Everyone knows that books are the best Christmas gifts, whether giving or receiving. Well, imagine how awesome it would be to have your wrapped presents sitting happily under this awesome Christmas tree made out of books:
Imagine that little beauty nestling in the corner of your living room (or, if you’re living the dream, your library):I’m going to make it my goal to collect old books over the next year and make one for Christmas 2012.
Tonight, I have tried (and failed) to create a passable paper crane.
I followed these instructions and yet still managed to get it quite wrong towards the end. I’m normally not too bad at craft stuff but this completely stumped me.
It was my first proper attempt at any kind of origami and the first time I had introduced the art of paper folding into Craft Night. This was my (really quite terrible) attempt:
I’m going to keep trying, get really good at it and get some proper craft paper to make loads of pretty ones to decorate the flat with at Christmas.
After that attempt though, I thought I’d better call it a night so instead had a disco half hour dancing around the living room with the lights off by myself.
Rock and/or roll.
I’ve shown love for my fellow bloggers before via my one a day blog, and I think it’s time you all witnessed the glory and wonder that is The Creative Panic.
Written (or should I say drawn) by Ben Hood, this is a collection of awesome drawings as part of the same project. He’s one of the most talented illustrators I’ve ever come across and this is my recent favourite:
Dude also does commissions and prints if you so wish to adorn the walls of your office/abode.
Enjoy!
I recently got involved with a great little project that my friend Greg and his friend Marie look after, called Playlist Club.
It’s a music curation project, with different people submitting a music mix each week all in the crusade to help the good folk of the internet to find music that is new to them. What I love about Playlist Club is the idea that it is a “haven of curated music amidst a world wide web of algorhithmic recommendations.”
Illustration by kipikapopo.com
Real music, chosen by real people for real reasons, with a bit of a back story. A digital sharing of a very analogue past time.
This week it was my turn. I made a mixtape about feeling poorly, it inadvertently ended up full of pop punk and ska, with a smattering of indie for good measure. You can listen to my mix and read about it here.
Digital is brilliant, but the mass online exodus towards the virtual aisles of formerly high-street shops have left many town centres looking forlorn and run-down. So:
Q. What do you do with a derelict high street?
A. Ask the people who live nearby and use the space around it what they’d do with it, of course!
That’s exactly what ‘I wish this was’ did.
Imagination, interactivity, straw poll, market research, civil involvement, dream-sharing… Call it what you will, it’s a beautifully simple idea, brilliantly executed. What would you turn the empty buildings in your town into?
I’ve been reading books by a rather fabulous author, Lindsey Kelk for a while now. Anyway, she doesn’t just write stories, she also blogs quite a bit, about beauty, (good) music and her own adventures.
On her blog a while back, she asked her readers to submit their ‘to do’ lists as part of the launch of her latest novel, The Single Girl’s to do list. So I did. She posted it on her blog alongside the others and I was thrilled with that, but I never imagined it’d end up in the actual printed, published book.
But it did!
I hope no one was offended by anything in there (especially my lovely family or chap, I said I felt like the black sheep as I wasn’t married/had kids but we don’t actually have any kind of black sheep – and I’m not a single girl, but I do have a to do list – it just sounds good for dramtic effect. It was either that or ‘SHARK ATTACK’ and I don’t think that would cut it, judging by the odd looks given to the woman on the direct line advert when she suggests it).
I saw it today in Waterstone’s in all its papery glory and I was dizzy with happiness. Okay, so it’s one page in someone else’s book so I’m not a published writer in the proper official sense, but if you look at the technicalities, I can kind of say I’ve achieved a small part of a big dream. My name is on there, and even the link to my blog got published and it mentions the very wonderful One a Day Project, too (which you can donate money to for Cancer Research here if you’re feeling generous). I’m rather proud and can’t wait to get properly stuck into the rest of the story, too. You can buy it here if you want to read it.
This has all spurred me on to write even more – not just via this blog but to carry on with the stories as well.
All in all a great day. I also found out my amazing little sister passed a big part of her teacher training course and one of my best friends got a first in his engineering degree. Hurrahs all round!
Without wanting to sound too much like Heather Small: What have you done lately that makes you feel proud?
I’ve just finished reading Dorian: an Imitation by Will Self.
As always, I was blown away by Self’s intricate and knowingly clever prose, and the fact that story was built on one of the best-loved books of my adolescence – The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde – just added to the mix to make it all the more enjoyable. Disturbing, heartfelt, evocative, provocative, saddening and terrifying in equal measures, the book serves to recreate Wilde’s dandies as a portrait of the Gay scene in London and New York in the 1980s and early to mid 1990s – the hedonism and cultural liberation of the fin-de-siecle art world swirling together in the grip of the emergence of AIDS. It’s a gripping read and splendidly told at the bedside of several of the characters, sucking you into a sordid underworld of drugs, sex and vanity; but at the same time having Self’s telltale wry sprinkling of humour. I absolutely loathed some of the characters but loved the book and on more than one occasion found myself stopping to re-read a particularly well-crafted sentence.
Every book I read by Will Self inspires me to get my pen out, or put fingers to keyboard and create something. If you’ve read the book recently, or re-read it in the context of now and not of the ’80s/’90s, you might draw parallels with any of your own user-generated content and Baz Hallward’s Cathode Narcissus, which forms the centrepiece for the novel. The image below is as close as I could get, it’s Nam-june Paik’s video installation, ‘Moon is the Oldest TV’. No one seems to have made an actual Cathode Narcissus yet – I was sorely disappointed when I discovered that www.cathodenarcissus.com a) did not exist and b) did not even pretend to exist – maybe I should create it? Maybe I really shouldn’t – maybe that’s the point? I loved how one of my other favourite writers, Joe Stretch, intertwined both Friction and Wild Life with the real world and the virtual one, but then again I suppose Dorian was written in 2002, right before or even on the cusp of the explosion of mini-Cathode Narcissi sites like Facebook and Myspace, so it is perhaps to be expected.
My interpretation of Dorian: an Imitation was made all the more resounding by an article I read in today’s Observer, by Aleks Krotoski, about the ever-blurring lines between online and offline identities. It talks about how online we have the power to create ourselves as we wish to be seen, rather than how we actually are; but due to the fact that technology and ‘real life’ are becoming more and more intertwined, that polished version of ourselves has inevitably become more real. Our Facebook pages, our Twitter feed and our blogs (yes, including this one) are increasingly brighter, shinier versions of our own lives. We can edit out the undesirable bits and amplify the good parts of ourselves. We can curate our interests, leaving out our guilty pleasures and instead tailoring our personalities to be the version of ourselves that we want the world to see. We are effectively leaving the digital world strewn with billions upon billions of our own versions of Baz Hallward’s Cathode Narcissi.
I’m not a morbid person – for the most part – but I do sometimes wonder what kind of eulogy I’m building for myself online.
Are these banks of links and pages of profiles really the only legacies that we want to leave in our wake?
Today I thought I’d share with you to continue on a travelling theme as tonight will be my last night in Palma as you’re reading this, due to the fact that I scheduled this post on Wednesday, get me… Organiso! This is a collection of world maps according to stereotype. Of course, it’s just a bit of fun so don’t rag on me for laughing at it. You laughed too, admit it. Especially at the Switzerland one. Go on, give it a click. There are 12 of these images that make up a calendar of prejudice and you can buy them from Behance.net. The one below is the world according to the United states of America:
Today our team got dropped with one of those ‘can you just…’ moments at work. But the sun was shining, I’d made a Tuesday resolution to keep smiling and it was something that we’ve wanted to work on for months so we of course said yes. Our team literally sprang into action. We all just ploughed through and got everything done and it looked good, was well-structured with a decent idea and a good rationale. Even though it was a good chunk of work that could’ve easily taken weeks, it ended up getting done in a matter of hours and it was done well.
I love having days like that. I felt proud to be part of my team and the ideas under pressure thing reminded me of why I love my job. Shattered tired tonight so I’ll leave it there. Hope tomorrow is as productive!
Some of the lovely folks I work with in the Creative department are putting together a newspaper. It turns out it’s quite easy to do with a tiny bit of design knowhow and a good idea. There’s a company called Newspaper Club who will print your paper from as little as five copies and they look pretty special.
Which got me thinking. Maybe we should put together a paper for The One A Day project. What d’you reckon?
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I do digital and fashion by day, mixtapes and gin by night. I like books, good design, tea and living in London.
If you'd like me to write something for you, get in touch: critchers@gmail.com
